Posts

Sock Thoughts

Image
I really want more knit socks. There are skeins of sock yarn hidden in drawers, waiting for their turn.  Machine Knitting has mostly ‘solved’ socks. There's a lot of great tutorials you can follow for most kinds of knitting machines.  If you have a single bed machine, you knit the front of the sock, then seam-as-you-go when you knit the back, inserting a short row heel based on your shoe size. If you have a v-bed, you knit in the round until the heel, then disengage the front of the machine and knit your heel. When that’s done, you can raise the bed back into working position and continue to knit circularly. If you have a CSM, you take half the stitches out of work and work in a short row heel then resume knitting circularly. All these techniques involve hanging weights. You can’t hang weights on the Kniterate, it has rollers like an industrial machine. It can short row, but you can’t disengage the front bed, the knitting will still be pulled down by the rollers. I’ve knit a ‘f

Learning to Tuck on the Kniterate

Image
I'm more than a year into my Kniterate journey at this point and most days I still don't understand why it does certain things. (Ojolly's classes are a big help, if you find yourself in possession of one of these machines.)  I've been studying some knitting machine books and found some pretty easy tuck patterns, designed for people with single bed manual machines. A manual bed only requires that the needle be pushed out of work, but a Kniterate cannot knit and tuck on the same pass.  Hence, this lovely work around: A blue stitch is a knit on the front bed, a yellow stitch is a knit on the back bed. To do this basic 4x4 tuck, I need to put the loops on the back bed and transfer them back.  It's weird. But it works.  I knit this sample in Tamm Kitty, a 2/14 acrylic yarn.  My first sample, I used an 8 stitch on the front bed and a 6 stitch on the back bed.  The stitch definition wasn't very good and there were lots of dropped tucks. Both the 4 and 2 stitch sizes ga